244 SYSTEMS OF TREATING STAMMERING
With the hypnotic method, the physician brings
the patient into a state of hypnosis and obtains from
him an account of his troubles; he then endeavors to
trace back the process of " conversion." This method
was the one first employed in psychoanalysis, but it
has now been pretty generally discarded.
In analyzing the patient's dreams, the physician
interprets them as symbolic fulfilments of repressed
wishes:
"If you will undertake to consider the dreams of young
children from the age of a year and a half on, you will find them
quite simple and easy to interpret. The young child always
dreams of the fulfilment of wishes which were aroused in him the
day before and were not satisfied. You need no art of interpre-
tation to discover this simple solution, you only need to inquire
into the experiences of the child on the day before (the 'dream
day5). Now it would certainly be a most satisfactory solution
of the dream-riddle, if the dreams of adults too, were the same
as those of children, fulfilments of wishes which had been
aroused in them during the dream day. This is actually the
fact; the difficulties which stand in the way of this solution
can be removed step by step by a thorough analysis of the
dream.
"There is, first of all, the most weighty objection, that the
dreams of adults generally have an incomprehensible content,
which shows wish-fulfilment least of anything. The answer
is this: these dreams have undergone a process of disguise, the
psychic content which underlies them was originally meant for
quite different verbal expression. You must differentiate be-
tween the manifest dream-content, which we remember in the
morning only confusedly, and with difficulty clothe in words